Hi Everyone,
This week, my book got a cover.
This is always an exciting moment for authors, but for me it has been a particularly gratifying experience this time around because I designed it, through a combination of intentional choice and complete happenstance. Because the cover means a lot to me, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how it came to be, what it’s all about.
This is the original version that I made, sometime last year, in early February. I like it so much, in part because I haven’t kept up with Photoshop over the years, don’t really know how to use Adobe software, don’t really know how to design things in terms of best practices or any training. That’s to say that the cover surprised me when it came out looking like this—I couldn’t have made it if I tried, but in experimenting, I did end up making it. To this day, I don’t know how I made the cup explode into hearts; it’s a particular effect on photoshop, but I don’t remember which one or how to recreate the effect.1
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Let me back up. I started with the body, which belongs to a real person. I looked up how to make collages on the internet. I cut Amelia Fletcher out from this photo. I wanted to at least try starting with Fletcher because of how important she is for the indie pop movement, the cultivation of soft femme sensibilities in the indie space when there wasn’t much precedent. Fletcher helped consolidate an approach to playing guitar rock that didn’t have to be aggressive (though it could be), reaching out to people in the indie scene who felt alienated by its social dynamics even as they yearned for the music.
In a documentary about the essential indie label Sarah Records, Fletcher explains:
The music scene was really macho and really noisy...and we, Heavenly, reacted against that and Sarah reacted against that. But of course that was what the press was building up and loved. And we were not; we were the antithesis.
For this, Fletcher’s bands (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and more), along with indie pop more generally, were castigated by New Musical Express and Melody Maker, the two major indie papers of the time. This was done with all of the predictable, traditional sexism that conflates ostensibly girly characteristics (e.g. “amateurism” and “emotionality”) with pejorative quality (e.g. “horrible,” “sad” music).
Putting Fletcher on my book cover, even in this form, felt a subtle and important way to honor the foundations of what would become Big Feelings, many decades later. I like to think that her docs, still legible despite the collage treatment, help signal to potential readers what kind of book this is, performing some of its arguments about shared languages and affective resonances that orient us around us around a world in common. This part of the cover is its anchor in real history.
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The arms and the bass come from some version of this image, featuring Naota of the legendary anime OVA, FLCL. This coming of age story gave me the biggest feelings when I first saw it circa 2010, in part because of its incredible indie rock soundtrack.
Paired with a story about a little kid falling in love with an older woman he can’t hope to understand, the show seemed to capture what it felt like for me to grow up in the 90s, listening to the Smashing Pumpkins and just pining. For what, exactly, was unknowable—and that’s the point: Pining for anything, but especially when you’re young, involves the projection of fantasy onto an experience you know nothing about, and desire for exactly that reason.
There is a part of Big Feelings that is informed by my younger self, both the dreams he had and the foolishness, perhaps inevitable, but gendered in a specific way that it became a project of my adulthood to uncover and make peace with. Embracing that kid for his failings and ambitions is a part of what Big Feelings means in my life, so Naota goes on the cover—but not holding his guitar; instead, he’s holding Haruko’s bass, that instrument that became so thoroughly associated with women in indie music, from the Pixies through Zwan.
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The final component is the giant chalice head, which I lovingly lifted from the Tarot of the Holy Spectrum’s Ace of Cups card. If you know anything about Big Feelings, you know that tarot and astrology are central to its arguments. You also know that in the tarot, the cups are the suits associated with feelings and emotional undercurrents, making it ideal for representations of the book’s themes. If you know me, you also know that Ace of Cups is an incredible/queer/indie bar in Columbus that was founded by one of the members of pioneering feminist punk band Scrawl.
All of which is to say that when I went looking for a head for this collage, I knew a chalice of some kind had to go on the cover. That said, for however perfect the Ace of Cups ended up being, I also wanted to alter the image enough to make the reference slightly less obvious. When I discovered this mystery feature that exploded a select area into hearts—HEARTS!—that was it. The potentially saccharine or embarrassingly earnest connotations of so much romantic confetti couldn’t have been more ideal for capturing the unapologetically sentimental tenor of so much of the music I write about in the book, a book that starts, after all, in reminiscence about growing up listening to a band that sold T-shirts with actual hearts on their sleeves.2
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The idea to try a collage like this in the first place came from a tattoo artist whose work I love. I hope to bring the idea full circle and get the girl on my forearm someday. But I need to get back to Rome for that to happen.
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Finally, on the background color: The image above is my strong preference, but owing to my publisher’s print capacities, we had to change it pretty significantly. We tried to keep it as close to lavender as possible, for the connotations and contrast both. Despite losing this electric hue, it still came out looking like the book I’m proud of.
Cry hard.
My access to the software, which came through Ithaca College, has also subsequently expired. No more experimenting for me.
Wait, I do own one of these. Does this mean I can make $400?